In which Our Hero describes what it's like to be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no car, no job, no money, and worst of all, no cigarettes.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

In which the idea of tripping balls for three years straight is presented to our hero.

I found it absolutely impossible to sleep last night. I had been up at around 8:30 last morning and I had received very little sleep then, so I was looking forward to passing out at a reasonably bourgeoisie hour last evening; I went to bed at around 11:30 with the assumption that I could get some solid shut-eye and awake refreshed early in some semblance of a normal diurnal schedule.

I gave up on the prospect shortly after midnight. I got up and proceeded to squint blearily at my computer monitor for a solid three hours in an attempt to tire myself out sufficiently for bed. This was made more difficult by the door to the downstairs hallway miraculously coming open on its own again somewhere around 1:30 in the morning, which resulted in a mad dash to find an errant cat before he disappeared into the thick Pennsylvanian æther.

The door has routinely opened on its own for a few nights, now. I'm unsure what causes it. The weather has been terribly humid, causing the door to swell in the frame; it makes it exceedingly hard to both open and close securely. The previous tenants had devised some bizarre rope-and-pulley Rube Goldberg device to pull the door closed from the top of the stairs, but I soon lost patience with such an infernal contraption and dismantled it. The mysterious egress has been opening itself ever since, even after I tightened the latch hardware with a screwdriver.

It was brought to my attention last night, as I escorted a large cat back up the stairs, something that I had thought rather puzzling at the time that I fixed the door handle a few days ago: the door locked from the 2nd floor hallway side, not the side on the interior of the room. The room up here had been a bedroom for years. Wouldn't the lock be on the inside to ensure privacy for the person living up here? Why would the lock be on the outside? Have I stumbled inadvertently into some V.C. Andrews horror narrative where I'll be locked in one night? Are there indeed flowers in the attic? Do I even have a sister?

My paranoia was already running high when another tidbit was revealed to me by the forces of You'll Get No Sleep Tonight, Asshole: the daughter of Our Glorious and Benevolent Benefactor (May He Live Forever) shared, a few days ago, that from approximately thirteen to sixteen years of age she was completely out of her mind on LSD and only stopped when she started seeing trails when she wasn't high as a god damned GPS satellite. Little Miss I'm-Tripping-Balls used to live in the selfsame 3rd floor attic bedroom that Our Hero now occupies.

Jesus Christ, was she locked up here for those years as she gibbered and slavered, while Dr. Leary's magic potion coursed through the wrinkles in her pickled brain? Are there claw marks underneath the floorboards? Retaining clips for restraints in the closet? The prospect gave me chills; the idea of inhabiting a living space that I shared with a teenage Syd Barrett that, once upon a time, very well could have been finger-painting the walls up here with her own shit while her parents argued loudly about "just what the hell do we do with her" on the other side of a locked door tends to make my skin crawl.

Is it any wonder why I didn't get any fucking sleep? How do I interact with this woman from now on and not imagine her strutting about in this space dressed in a burlap sack with menstrual blood caked on her thighs and her eyes jutting off in different directions like a chameleon's? Furthermore, just what in the holy Hell have I gotten myself into?